gifmachine

A Machine for Gifs

Need an excuse to show a gif to your coworkers?
Need a use for that Raspberry Pi that isn't doing anything useful?
Need a web-scale solution to your animated gif needs?

Presenting the newest GMaaS (Gif Machine as a Service) solution for your tech company with a startup culture: gifmachine

What actually is it?

gifmachine is a Ruby Sinatra app that provides a dirty interface for enjoying gifs with your coworkers. gifmachine provides a HTTP API for posting gifs and meme text to overlay.
gifmachine allows your coworkers to complain about company_x's broken API when it goes down and laugh as the internet catches fire.
gifmachine is designed to be run in kiosk mode on an unused computer and monitor, it's just a webpage that puts the gif meme in fullscreen.

How does it work?

It mostly does! When it is working well...

gifmachine uses WebSockets to send out updates to connected clients.
gifmachine stores everything in a database (developed with Postgres, but it shouldn't be too hard to change that).
gifmachine uses ActiveRecord to save the developer time and calories.

WebSockets?

Setting up locally

This project use devcontainers to simplify the development process. The devcontainers can be used with VSCode or directly with GitHub UI

The devcontainer is configured to use Ruby 3.1 and Postgres 9.6. Also it will install the necessary Ruby dependecies and create the database After the devcontainer starts

Run ruby app.rb to start the server
Browse to http://localhost:4567

Using containerized version locally

Get Docker Desktop
Start env docker-compose up
Stop env docker-compose down or ^C

Note: Hot reload was not implemented so for any change in the code it is necessary to rebuild the image with docker-compose up --build

Posting Gifs

Using curl you can post a gif and some text to register it in the gifmachine

curl --data 'url=http://www.example.com/somegif.gif&who=thatAmazingPerson&meme_top=herp&meme_bottom=derp&secret=yourSuperSecretPasswordFromAppRb' 'http://yourGifMachineUrl/gif'

Configuring for Production

To run in production, you will need the following:

Pass the environment variable RACK_ENV=production
You will want to setup a Postgres database, and then run bundle exec rake db:create && bundle exec rake db:migrate against it before running the app.
You will pass in an environment variable DATABASE_URL of the format postgres://username:password@database-url:5432/database-name
Lastly, you will also want to set a password for the API, via the environment variable GIFMACHINE_PASSWORD.

Moser-ss/gifmachine